A Theory of Global Governance: Authority, Legitimacy, and Contestation

by Michael Zürn

This book offers a major new theory of global governance, explaining both its rise and what many see as its current crisis. The author suggests that world politics is now embedded in a normative and institutional structure dominated by hierarchies and power inequalities and therefore inherently creates contestation, resistance, and distributional struggles. Within an ambitious and systematic new conceptual framework, the theory makes four key contributions. Firstly, it reconstructs global governance as a political system which builds on normative principles and reflexive authorities. Second, it identifies the central legitimation problems of the global governance system with a constitutionalist setting in mind. Third, it explains the rise of state and societal contestation by identifying key endogenous dynamics and probing the causal mechanisms that produced them. Finally, it identifies the conditions under which struggles in the global governance system lead to decline or
deepening .

Rich with propositions, insights, and evidence, the book promises to be the most important and comprehensive theoretical argument about world politics of the 21st century.

Genres: International Relations

332 pages, Hardcover

Published May 15, 2018

About the author

Michael Zürn is Professor of Political Science at Free University Berlin and Director of the research unit 'Transnational Conflicts and International Relations' at the Social Science Research Center, Berlin. He was founding Dean of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin (2004–9) and is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science. Michael Zürn's research focuses on international institutions and organizations and their repercussions for the foundations of political order. He is concerned especially with questions of the emergence of international regimes, as well as with issues related to the effectiveness of those regimes and compliance with the regulatory systems which they establish. Latest book publications include Handbook on Multi-Level Governance (co-edited with Hendrik Enderlein and Sonja Wältli, 2010) and Rule of Law Dynamics: In an Era of International and Transnational Governance (co-edited with André Noellkaemper and Randall Peerenboom, Cambridge, 2012).